On the 17th March 2008 Stallfinder, the UK's first one-stop shop for stallholders, events and fundraising ideas went live. I'd been trying to find stallholders for a fundraising event and thought it would be much easier if everything was in one place for event organisers and stallholders.
In order to get things up and running we offered free stallholder business listings plus I entered quite a few event listings myself so that the website didn't look too empty. I then posted about it everywhere I could find, business forums, craft forums, mums in business sites and, a bit later on, Twitter and Facebook – basically anywhere that I could find in order to spread the word about the new website. It took a few years to make any money and we reinvested our profits in a new bespoke website design a few years later.
Scroll forward 7 years and Stallfinder now has over 2000 stallholders and 7500+ events listed plus lots of other advertisers. We average around 72 000 unique page views a month and in 2014 we had 11 million hits. We also have over 30 000 Twitter followers and 8000+ Facebook likes.
Yesterday it was exactly 7 years since the website went live. We're still here and, despite quite a few copycat websites and Facebook sites, we're still going strong.
